Current Contraction Surpasses "Great Recession" or Is It All Just 'The Big Scoop'?

Rick Davis at the Consumer Metrics Institute emails his latest. Here;s what you should take out of his report:

On October 20, 2010 the aggregate severity of the 2010 contraction in consumer demand surpassed the similar measure of economic pain experienced during the "Great Recession." And a glance at our "Contraction Watch" tells us that the pain is not about to end anytime soon:

In the above chart, the day-by-day courses of the 2008 and 2010 contractions are plotted in a superimposed manner, with the plots aligned on the left margin at the first day during each event that our Daily Growth Index went negative. The plots then progress day-by-day to the right, tracing out the changes in the daily rate of contraction in consumer demand for the two events.

The true severity of any contraction event is the area between the "zero" axis in the above chart and the line being traced out by the daily contraction values. By that measure the "Great Recession of 2008" had a total of 793 percentage-days of contraction over the course of 221 days, whereas the current 2010 contraction has reached 820 percentage-days over the course of 282 days -- without yet clearly forming a bottom. The damage to the economy is already 3% worse than in 2008, and the 2010 contraction has lasted 28% longer than the entire 2008 event without yet starting to recover...

From time to time we have been asked whether we consider the current contraction in consumer demand to be the second "dip" in a "double dip" recession. From a qualitative perspective, we believe that the "Great Recession" is not so much a "double-dip" as a single "big-scoop" that changed character somewhere in the middle. We understand that the NBER says that the recession ended in June 2009. However quantitatively/technically correct that may be by NBER standards, by "Main Street" gut-feeling standards the NBER assertion is somewhere between questionable and ludicrous, depending on the personal circumstances of the observer.

Note: The data from CMI is extremely valuable in detailing the intensity of any ups and downs, but its structure is designed to detect the here and now versus the future. Thus,there is nothing here to detect the turn upward in the manipulated economy that we fully expect, if Bernanke goes through with QE2. That will show up in CMI's data much quicker than the governments data, but not until it actually starts to occur.